Book Review: Z Generation

Z Generation: Into the Heart of Russia’s Fascist Youth by Ian Garner (Hurst, 2023).

No, not “Generation Z.” Easy mistake to make just from looking at the title, but no. This isn’t yet another study of the generation gap in the Western world. This book is about something completely different, and a lot more disturbing.

Historian and analyst Ian Garner has longstanding connections in Russia, where he once studied. For this examination of how the Russian government and culture are shaping the country’s younger generation, he was able to speak directly with a number of Russian citizens, both teens and adults. He’s also surveyed everything from official statements by the Putin government and the Russian Orthodox Church, to social media posts by Russian kids.

From all of this data, one central theme emerges: Russia is systematically and deliberately instilling in its children hatred, vengefulness, and the desire to kill.

Maybe, as I’ve just phrased it, that statement sounds melodramatic, even judgmental. Garner’s book is neither of those things. He’s carefully collected, organized, and laid out an overwhelming amount of evidence to back up his claims. The events, reactions, and discussions he covers have happened out in the open, with plenty of documentation, and he writes about them as dispassionately as possible.

Garner’s goal here is not to stir up rage against Russia, but simply to help those outside the country understand what’s going on within its borders, and why we should be concerned about it.

He takes us back to the 1990s, when the country was still reeling after the Soviet collapse, and shows how Vladimir Putin, instead of concentrating seriously on fixing Russia’s problems, threw his energy into spinning a web of nationalistic “fairy tales” that caught up even the most jaded Russians. A renewed focus on the glamour and glory of being a Russian—and the subhumanness of anyone who wasn’t a Russian—managed to pull people’s attention away from the sputtering economy and crumbling infrastructure.

Garner’s descriptions of the national attitude toward outsiders will strike a chord with anyone who’s observed Russia’s presence in the arts, pop culture, or sports over the past several years. If you’ve been following the Kamila Valieva case, for example, you know how Russians all the way up to the highest levels have whined, complained, stonewalled, and blamed the West over the doping of their own 15-year-old Olympic skater. (Thanks to their stalling in this case, incidentally, the team figure skating medals from the 2022 Winter Olympics still have not been awarded.)

But that sort of thing is just the tip of a Titanic-sized iceberg. Central to Putin’s project was “a total militarization of the state and a mission to wipe out a racial enemy … and re-conquer a lost empire.” This explains the intrusion of the government into every corner of Russian life, and particularly the lives of kids. As Garner puts it, “The state sits in thousands of children’s pockets, nestled in the device they are using to create their reality.” The rising generation is seen as key to the state’s ideals of conquest, so those ideals are infused into everything from youth military organizations to viral TikTok videos. Even the youngest children are fed a steady diet of war stories and encouraged to dream of self-sacrifice on the battlefield, as the one sure way to renew their nation.

Garner astutely analyzes the view of the Ukrainians pushed by the Russian government and parroted by everyone from grandparents to kids: It has nothing to do with anything Ukraine has actually done. It’s all about hating and dehumanizing Ukrainians simply for existing.

Ukrainians are subjected to torrents of abuse that echo the language of Nazism: they are “diseased,” “beasts,” “monsters,” “animals,” and—worst of all—nelyudi, “unpeople.” “Why poison a handful of cockroaches with sarin when there are a host of simpler and cheaper ways to do it?” asked one popular journalist and blogger after Russia was accused of using chemical weapons in Ukraine.

As with so much propaganda, there’s little rhyme or reason to any of it. Even as Russians accuse Ukrainians of being Nazis who must therefore be completely destroyed, Russia welcomes known neo-Nazis into its government and other institutions. The blatant doublespeak and hypocrisy are enough to give Orwell a migraine.

Even the “Z” symbol that gives the book its title has “no root in Russian culture,” Garner notes—it’s just an “empty” symbol randomly chosen by the government to convey a pro-war meaning.

But—again, as propaganda so often is—it’s all frighteningly effective, thanks in large part to its sheer ubiquity. The church, the press, the schools, and every other institution in the country have been co-opted into the service of these myths and messages (where they didn’t go along eagerly with it all from the start). Any opposition is heavily punished, which explains why it’s slowed to a trickle.

Garner starts his book with a chilling exploration of the VK page (similar to Facebook) of a 19-year-old Russian girl, Alina. Nearly overnight, her page went from showcasing fashion videos and posts about “Game of Thrones” to declaring “F— those Ukronazi scum” and featuring “apocalyptic images of a burning White House in ‘Fashington, DC.’” Alina is just one of many similar examples. The book gets rather repetitive at times, with so much hammering on the same themes, but the effect is to help us understand just how immersive this culture of vengeance is.

Garner has ideas about what can be done to counteract the effects of the Russian “death cult,” but he acknowledges that it will be agonizingly slow work. He touches on the importance of helping people trapped in such a cult find something better to live for. And the reader can’t help but reflect that maybe this whole tragic situation was set up when the world expected that the delights of consumerism would help draw the former Soviets toward democracy and Western values. Any society that relies on materialism and hedonism to promote world peace should know that it’s making itself vulnerable to being lured down the same dark path.

(Cover image copyright Hurst)

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Z Generation on Amazon
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Goodreads Links:

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